To photograph the future of death, you've gotta feel dead

The alkaline hydrolysis Resomator at the University of California is the latest in crematory technology. The high-pressured chamber, pictured above, is more environmentally friendly than your average cremation, with potassium hydroxide being mixed with water and heated to 150°C, dissolving the body and avoiding CO2 emissions. This, is the future of death.

For WIRED photographer Spencer Lowell, getting a closer look at the Resomator for our September issue feature meant diving straight in. "To get the perfect shot, I was wrapped in bioplastic, just as a corpse would be and went inside the machine. I even let my foot hang out for a little added drama," he explains. "It would’ve been unethical to photograph an actual corpse but I wanted to show how the machine works."

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Although only in the machine for five minutes, Lowell found the whole experience unsettling. "It was impossible to ignore my own mortality and the smell of warm, recently expired seafood." And, at the back of a room, an ominous cabinet full of artificial body parts – the only things not dissolved in the Resomator. "There’s something very humbling about holding a breast implant or a hip joint that that was inside of a persons body that now no longer exists. I never thought a penile implant would give me a spiritual experience" he says.

"The shoot pushed my understanding of my own impermanence to the forefront of my consciousness. It makes it difficult to pretend I’m not just a bag of bones after going into a machine that turns bodies into a pile of bones".

Read Dissolve, written by Hayley Campbell with photography by Spencer Lowell, in the September issue of WIRED magazine, on sale now.